Random projects and posts

It’s now the end of December 2018 and it has been another busy year for me and Andrew with our businesses and hobbies.
Our website design business Apexweb LTD has been running along in the background as we are concentrating...

When out cycling either on my cyclocross bike or mountain bike, I use Strava to record my rides and routes. One useful feature on the Strava website is the heatmap https://www.strava.com/heatmap#11.43/-2.13253/50.66380/hot/ride...

With the very hot weather in the United Kingdom this summer we decided to try to improve the cooling on our computers by replacing our air cooled heatsinks with a sealed loop water cooler system.
At the end of July we...

When the new GoPro Hero 7 models were announced I decided it was time to upgrade my old GoPro Hero 3 model to a new version so I can use it on my bike rides for making videos for our Virtual Swanage website and the cycling...

Our Atlas CMS system, which we have developed and used for many years as the content management system for our websites and ecommerce shops, first used a WYSIWYG editor called FCKEditor which was released in 2003 and then...

I have added a new page to the blog which lists my latest uploads on my YouTube channel. I found that YouTube has a rss feed for channels which can be used in a RSS reader.
The format of the RSS urls is http://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC3rrX8tBXk8eGutDTAHdXDQ...

Over the past 2 months there has been a heatwave in the United Kingdom and so we haven’t been doing many electronics or new projects due to the high temperatures in the loft workshop.
We have been spending time working...

After the removal of our Raspberry Pi based home data logger and the installation of the Mosquitto MQTT and Home Assistant Data Logging system in March this year we have not been able to monitor the solar hot water pump...

Over the past few months Andrew has been working on a new circuit for a custom home alarm system to replace our current hardwired commercial alarm.
For the display panel on the new alarm we are going to be using a...

I don't normally write personal posts about myself but with 2018 being the 20th anniversary of starting my own business Apexweb, I thought I would write about the ups and downs of the past twenty years of being self...

We have removed the Raspberry Pi based data logger from our home and moved the logging hardware and new software to the Gigabit Internet Gateway Network PC which we installed in December 2017.
The old Raspberry Pi...

I have decided to remove the disqus comment system from my blog posts. I have had a few issues with the disqus system including:
Post order – oldest posts not always on top.
Links to other sites and spam.
Long...

After a few weeks of reading about all the YouTube channels losing their ability to display adverts and receive a small income from their videos the email from YouTube has finally arrived for my YouTube channel to tell...

This code example shows how you can use C# in either a Windows application or asp.net website to retrieve data from the Nest API to show information for your Nest Thermostat or Nest Smoke Alarms.
Before starting to write...

Following from our home network upgrade in August 2017 we have been trying to find a way to add global adblocking for the computers, tablets and phones connected to our network and to run additional software.
We had...

Over the past few weeks we have been working on some of our own websites to rewrite the code and pages to use Bootstrap which is an open source toolkit for developing with HTML, CSS, and JS.
In the past we have always...

Another software update to the Pick and Place Controller Software for the DIY pick and place machine. Since the UI redesign earlier this year I have now changed the vision system to use AForge.NET to read from the USB...

We test websites using tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to check the speed of their websites and find any potential issues with the content or other issues.
One problem we often find about regarding...

A few weeks ago, we purchased a tp-link LB130 smart bulb to use with the Home Assistant software we had been trying on the Raspberry Pi. The support for the bulb in the Home Assistant software was limited and so Andrew...

We converted our Axminster SIEG Super X1 micro mill to use ballscrews back in 2010 and every few months of use we have had to adjust the bearings to eliminate any backlash on the X and Y axis drives.
The original drive...

The home network installation for our computers was first setup using 10BASE2 coax connections when we only had 2 computers and one was connected to the internet via a modem. Since then we have upgraded to using first...